Rosemarie and Jeanne introduce Maria to women who work at hopeful jobs: legal aid, social work, clinic medicine. No one has money; everyone eats together: large plates of spaghetti, which is not yet called pasta. Some women are part of female couples; some speak apologetically (but not so apologetically as they would have the year before) about planning to get married. Maria has no impulse to be mated: not at all, she says. During one dinner she dramatically proclaims that she’d rather have her labia sewn together than get married.
In those years, for people like Maria, life moved very fast. Everything was rapid. Rapid, rapids: white water. Boulders. Some boats were overturned and wrecked. Many were not. For those who felt the goodness of the ride, it was exciting to get together in fragile boats. It was a cataract-filled rush, but there was a thrill in it compared to the dead stink of the swamp, the distorting light, the choking vines, perfect for camouflage. How the light seemed to clear when the swamp had been left behind! And if, to keep their crafts light, they had to throw out some things that were of value, some things they didn’t realize couldn’t be recovered? Well, they would say, that was sad. But there was the exhilaration of being set free.
One of the women in Maria’s consciousness-raising group decides to move to California and offers Maria her job, assistant at the Independent Organization for Refugees, a human rights organization. She is paid almost nothing; she types and files and is told she is saving lives by placing the right piece of paper in the right folder. Her friend who gave up the job no longer believes this. She says the work depresses her, the endless need to protect the innocent from mindless evil. She wants to move to California and make pottery in the mountains, a plan for which Maria has contempt. The word
burnout,
you see, is not yet current.
The Independent Organization for Refugees was founded and run by Clelia Roberts, an old-style Yankee idealist in her sixties with hair on top of her head in a Gibson girl knot, a navy blue suit, a series of identical light blue blouses that tie at the throat, flesh-colored stockings, and Hush Puppies that lace. She travels to the terrible places of the earth, comes home and writes about what she has seen, and sends it to newspapers and to powerful men: friends of her family. She raises money for heroic people to take back to their own countries. And then, for two months every year, she retreats to her family’s camp in Maine to look at the sea and pick blueberries.
Clelia likes Maria and Maria likes Clelia. Born an aristocrat, Clelia has no trouble showing her favoritism. She admires Maria’s speed and decisiveness and the style of her prose; soon she has Maria writing important reports. Maria doesn’t mind Clelia’s sharp tongue; when Clelia is rude, Maria tells her so and Celia is instantly abashed, shocked at her own behavior. In the five years Maria works for Clelia, ten other assistants come and go. Clelia keeps promoting Maria, but the raises in salary that accompany the promotions are quite small. Clelia doesn’t notice and Maria doesn’t mind because she doesn’t need much. A bohemian girl from the twenties, Clelia invites Maria to Maine and to badly cooked dinners in her town house in the Village. The two share the unease of knowing themselves as favored daughters, but they would never dream of speaking of it.
Day after day, Maria looks at photographs; she reads reports of terrible atrocities. She hears of the worst things human beings can do to one another. She wants to travel with Clelia and see for herself, but Clelia always needs her at home to run the office. One day, Clelia says. I promise. But it never happens.
On July 6, 1977, Maria meets Ya-Katey, who has come from Cambodia to the United States to get help for his people, trying to make the full horror of his country known.
Do we remember Cambodia, its names and places, or have they blurred for us in the fog of atrocities, other sites of mass murder, other killing fields: Bosnia, Rwanda, Kurdistan? We search our memory; we call up names: Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge. The people’s army of Kampuchea. Do we remember 1975, when Pol Pot took over the city of Phnom Penh? Do we remember what Pol Pot stood for, what his ideas were? A Marxist-agrarian idealist, violently nationalist, violently antitechnology and anti-intellectual, he murdered one in four of his people. In the years 1975 to 1979 the odds against any Cambodian dying a natural death were two to one.
Maria learns all this in 1977 from Ya-Katey, as she takes him to churches and to the homes of the wealthy to raise money for medical supplies. This is his focus; he has trained as a doctor in Paris. One statistic he presents is this: as a result of Pol Pot’s executions the number of doctors in Cambodia has fallen in two years from 270 to 40. Ya-Katey was imprisoned in a special jail set up for doctors, a former hospital. Each morning, one doctor was shot in front of the others. Each morning, they were told there was no more need for doctors. On one of the mornings, the soldier holding the rifle made an imaginary cutting motion with an imaginary knife across his stomach. “If someone needs to have their intestines removed, I will do it.”
Forty doctors for a country of eight million people. Imagine, he says, having only forty doctors in the city of New York.
He tries to make these wealthy well-meaning Americans understand Phnom Penh in 1975, when Pol Pot took over. “Imagine your city, New York, evacuated in one day like Phnom Penh was because the Khmer didn’t believe in cities; cities were dangerous. Imagine someone saying that all pure Americans were country people: that city people were a dangerous pustule on the healthy body of the nation.” He reminds them that Pol Pot wants a pure Cambodia, a peasant ideal he believes he experienced when he was in hiding in the north of his country. Try to imagine, he says, everyone you know being marched at gunpoint to the countryside to work as slaves—that is, those who are allowed to survive. You must remember, he says, that people are killed for anything, for almost nothing: for having an education or technical skills, for knowing French, even for wearing glasses. “Our school is the farm, the land is our paper, we will write by plowing,” Ya-Katey heard a soldier say before he shot a group of teachers.
There is no possible private life: children are buried alive for refusing to report on their parents, people are beheaded and their heads put on pikes for mourning the dead too publicly or too long.
You must try to imagine the madness of a country in the grip
of a murderous madman, he tells the safe Americans. To illustrate his point, in every speech he describes an orphanage he passed by as he was being led out of the city at gunpoint. The workers had been ordered to leave by soldiers who had convinced themselves that babies in cradles were enemies, counterrevolutionaries, didn’t deserve care. Some of the workers at the orphanage had refused to leave and were shot. “I heard the babies crying and I broke away. The soldiers followed me. I saw the bodies of the dead workers on the floor. Their bodies were rotting, and some babies were crawling around beside them. There were forty-eight cradles; forty-eight babies trapped in their cradles with literally no one looking after them. Some of them of course were already dead. There were twins in one cradle; one was alive, the other dead. Some babies tried to cry, but only a horrible sound came from their throats as they gasped for breath. Some people had sneaked in during the night and left cans of water and rice on banana leaves for the children on the floor. One of the children who had managed to crawl out of his crib was sitting on the floor, eating. His stomach was bloated and he looked dazed, but he couldn’t stop eating. A dead baby lay nearby.”
Ya-Katey told the soldiers he wouldn’t leave the children in this condition. He was hit in the head with a rifle butt and beaten to insensibility.
When he woke up, he was in prison in the countryside. Then the camp was attacked by the North Vietnamese. In the chaos, he escaped: over the Thai border and finally here, to America.
Every evening Maria drives him to the places he will speak; she introduces him in the name of Clelia’s organization. Clelia is very taken by him and tells Maria to show him around New York. In the mornings, in the afternoons, he wants to see things; he wants to eat well, particularly French food. He says he wants to store up images, images of beauty and of things beautifully done, so they will be a bank of hope for him to draw on in hopeless times. That is how he can order
escargots, agneau sanglante, haricots verts, tarte aux pommes;
return an unsatisfactory wine; accept, graciously, the apologies of the sommelier. How he can lose himself in the watery landscape of the Corot at the Frick, delight in the daub of red that is the boatman’s hat. “Pol Pot would have me killed for desiring
angneau sanglante,
and Corot,” he said, “because he says it is part of the corruption of Cambodian purity, an imperialist corruption. I fear purity; I fear it very much; it is a dangerous idea. I am a scientist, and I know that nothing alive is pure. To be pure is to be impervious to change, to mixture. Change and mixture is our lot, our lot as living things.”
And one night, delighting in her body, he says, “If we should have a child it would be very very impure: Jewish, Russian, Cambodian, Catholic, Buddhist. A real mess. I am in love with the idea of mess. The mess is our only hope against the tyranny of the pure.”
When he speaks about purity, he is thinking of murder. When she thinks of it, she thinks of surveillance. The kind of purity he fears is revolutionary purity. The kind she fears, the kind her experience has provided, is sexual. The purity that flew under the banner of virginity. The purity of the untouched body. The purity of the child. In her childhood, impurity meant only one thing: sexual defilement. Even to touch your body was a sin of impurity. She refuses a definition of virtue that insists she be either untouched or a child. But she feels that her ideas of purity are childish compared to his, and she is embarrassed to speak of them. When she asks him once why the idea of purity—of which there is no model, as he had often said, in nature—seems to have such a hold on the human imagination, he says, “It seems greatly desirable to be only one thing. To be, to do one thing fully, with no contradictions. To be a closed circle, impenetrable, impermeable. This, I believe, makes people feel safe.”
When he says
a closed circle, impenetrable, impermeable,
she thinks of the White Circle of the Host and of her First Communion when she was six. She does not want to admit to him that it was a wonderful feeling, a day when she had felt entirely pure. Her father had told her once that Napoleon had said his First Communion was the happiest day of his life. She didn’t know how her father knew this, but it was the kind of thing her father knew.
At twenty-nine, the age she is when she is with Ya-Katey, Maria hopes there will be happier days in her future. She would never have admitted, feeling as she does about her father and what her father stood for, that her First Communion was the happiest day of her life. If the thought entered her mind, she would banish it, annihilate it: a dangerous insurgent that must be blasted upon sight. As she has banished, every time it came to her, the thought that it was a wonderful feeling, the feeling of purity, of being whole, of being entirely one thing, and that thing only.
She wants to tell Ya-Katey about her First Communion, but it embarrasses her to be thinking of it, to be granting it any importance, when he is thinking about the horrors he has seen and the horrors that are going on in his homeland while he is here. Compared to that, her First Communion is ridiculous; she tells herself it would be blasphemous, even, to mention it to him. But the memory is vivid, and when he speaks of the dangers of purity, against her will the image of herself in her white dress enters her mind.
She remembers waking up on the day of her First Communion. Even the light coming in her window seemed sanctified; not drinking water that morning (although water was allowed), bathing herself in silence, dressing herself in silence, everything touching her body pure white, the living perfection of the form. A spotless girl child in white, with a bride’s white veil. If you died on the way home from your First Communion, one of the nuns had told them, it would be a perfect death. Were you supposed to pray for the grace of this perfect death, to pray for the favor of being run down by a car on the street at age six?
Inside her body: the Host, an illuminated circle; her ribs incandescent; the bones of the crucified Jesus visible to her through the stretched skin of his torso, ribs like her own incandescent ribs, illumined by the Host. She was glorified, transfigured, shining like the whitest snow. In her heart, an oval flamed, like the light of a lamp in a dark room, and she knew of course she would be one of the children willing to die in the name of this, this thing that was only one thing, the body of Christ, the thing she too had become: illumined, without blemish, without contradictions. Of course it would be easy to die. Only she could not pray for it. She did not want to die. Knowing she didn’t want to die, she feared herself imperfect, impure. But she very much wanted the perfection of the form, her sense of her life as shining and complete.
Maria is afraid of the connection between her childhood vision of beauty and the murder from which Ya-Katey has fled, perhaps only temporarily. She feels she has no right to speak. So she doesn’t tell him much about her life; she considers it far less important than his; she wants to give him pleasure and refreshment before he has to go back to horror, to what will probably be death.
“Must you go back?” she asks him once, and he says, “Yes, I can’t be safe here in this dream while my people are living a nightmare.”
So she creates a dream for him: a dream of pleasure. They laugh together; he teases her, calling her his luxury: “
Ma Luxe, pas calme, mais voluptueuse
.” He calls her his Jewish princess, and she tries to explain what that means in New York. He quotes the Song of Solomon:
Thy breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies.
And his body, slight to her, and light, almost as if a girl were above her, a girl with a man’s force but without the crushing mountainous feel that a heavy man’s body would provide.